Google total eclipse sees 40 percent drop in Internet traffic

Worldwide Internet traffic reportedly plunged by about 40 percent Friday night, when many of the tech titan’s services, including its trademark search engine, went dark for between 1 and 5 minutes.

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"That’s huge," Simon Tabor, a developer at the web analytics firm GoSquared told Sky News Online in the wake of the quasi-Internet eclipse. "As internet users, our reliance on Google.com being up is huge.”

"It's a massive surprise for all of Google's services to go down at the same time."

- Phil Dearson, head of strategy for Tribal Worldwide

The outage, which reportedly affected not only Google Search, but also Gmail, YouTube and Google Drive, occurred between 7:52 p.m. and 7:57 p.m. ET.

The company would not comment on the lapse’s cause, other than to direct Sky News Online and other inquiring media outlets to a brief message posted to Google Apps Dashboard that essentially acknowledged the situation.

Digital expert Phil Dearson, head of strategy for Tribal Worldwide, told Sky News Online, "This is completely unprecedented. I've never heard of anything like this before. One or two of Google's services have gone down in the past, like Gmail and Google Apps, but they both happened separately.

"It's a massive surprise for all of Google's services to go down at the same time. It's probably a physical infrastructure problem given the size of the outage, but it's hard to know at this stage."Click for the story from Sky News.